New Delhi, March 12: The government has decided not to ban BlackBerry services while it holds talks to find a way to monitor emails sent from this hand-held device.

Manufactured by Canada-based Research in Motion (RIM), the mobile phone-cum-virtual office is popular with executives and has over 12 million customers across the world.

A meeting today between telecom department officials, mobile operators offering BlackBerry services in India, RIM executives and security agencies decided that a method would be found for lawful interception of data transferred through the device, officials said.

Discussions will continue with all the members throughout the week on this issue, while no ban has been imposed on BlackBerry services yet, an official said.

However, it could not be confirmed if the government would go ahead with its March 30 deadline to stop BlackBerry services in the country.

The Centre had issued a notice asking Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications and BPL — which offer BlackBerry services — to stop the service by December 31, 2007, citing security concerns. The deadline was later extended to March-end.

But after Tata Teleservices revealed it was not granted permission to offer the service on security grounds, there was speculation that a ban might be imposed immediately.

Security agencies have always contended that since they cannot monitor content transferred on a BlackBerry — it is in an encrypted form and the servers are located in Canada and other foreign locations — it poses a threat. Militants can exchange information without security agencies being aware, they argue.

Encryption is the process of converting information into a form unintelligible to everyone except the holders of a specific key.

The government might ask RIM for access to its decoding key. The encryption technology, created by the US military, has been BlackBerrys main selling feature as it provides subscribers with a secure messaging service.

Security experts, however, said technology was available even to intercept emails sent from a BlackBerry. Data transferred through a BlackBerry can be intercepted and copied using sniffers put on gateways, said Rajat Khare, co-founder and director of Appin Security Group. Sniffers are software packages that can help intercept and understand encrypted data.

RIM operates in more than 130 countries around the world and respects the regulatory requirements of governments. RIM does not comment on confidential regulatory matters... an official statement from the company said.